To say there was joy unconfined across the European centre and left at the election results in France last night would be, I think, a considerable understatement. Almost as soon as the first indications emerged that Marine LePen’s party had been beaten into third place, exuberant centrists and left wingers celebrated the triumph of their ideology over the apparently terrifying prospect of a LePen majority in the French parliament. Where I am, in Ukraine, I imagine that the result was greeted with similar relief, as there have long been well-founded suspicions that Ms. Le Pen’s party is less than ambivalent about the outcome of the war here, and may have sought to undermine the defence of this country.
On balance, the result proves one thing: That in France, at least, revulsion at the prospect of being governed by LePen is still a stronger emotion in the electorate than revulsion at the widespread failure of the left and the centre to deliver positive outcomes for the population. The French were effectively asked “would you prefer LePen or continued dysfunction?” and answered with a resounding “we’ll take the dysfunction, one more time at least, please”.
In the short to medium term, this is something that LePen’s opponents can celebrate: They may agree on next to nothing else, but they clearly agree that gridlock and malaise is preferable to granting the so-called “far right” a foothold in Government.
But every silver lining has a cloud: Having defeated LePen, this lot will now have to find some way to govern France for the next three or so years until the next Presidential election, while LePen and her allies have the luxury of sitting, watching, and saying “we told you so”.
Whole treatises have been written on “the rise of the far right” across Europe, but many of them seem to have ignored the single biggest reason for the phenomenon: That the centre and the left have, for almost two decades now, been unable to govern effectively across the continent.
France’s problems are not dissimilar to the problems of other European nations: Rampant immigration has strained both public services and cultural cohesion. Falling birth rates have placed unsustainable demands on pensions and working hours and the low retirement age. The state has become bloated and unwieldy and in hoc to a whole array of lobbyists and NGOs and special interests. From the universities, a cultural revolution is being driven which assaults the traditional values of many voters on issues ranging from gender to free speech. All the while, the cost of living rises and crime and anti-social behaviour rises with it. That paragraph describes modern France, but it also describes the broad problems in Ireland, the UK, Sweden, Germany, and the United States.
The right, it must be said, does not have answers to all of these problems: Indeed at times, one might think that some on the right believe that lowering or reversing immigration would single-handedly solve them all. Ask a party of the new nationalist right what to do about the pension age, and you’ll usually get some populist waffle that’s devoid of solutions: Ms LePen’s answer, predictably enough, was to reduce the retirement age and fund it by cutting welfare payments to migrants – a policy which goes down great on the right, but for which the sums simply do not add up.
However, this is not LePen’s problem, since she did not win. And if the right can be credibly accused of lacking detailed solutions, the left and the centre are very often guilty of having no solutions at all.
In the first instance, this is because the left struggles to identify problems as being actual problems. The best example of this is on the birth rate, where the global left has a collective action problem: On the one hand, it insists that falling birth rates are nothing to worry about because childbearing is a lifestyle choice and not a social or national obligation. On the other hand, it insists on an ever-growing welfare state that must be funded well into the future by the taxes of the young. This is, mathematically speaking, an impossible problem to square.
The solution, to date, has been immigration. This is not a bad solution, when the people coming to your country are broadly culturally aligned with your own values and sufficiently educated to make a meaningful economic contribution. It becomes a terrible solution, however, when the bulk of migrants start coming from low education, culturally backwards countries, and start placing demands on an already strained housing and welfare situation whilst importing cultural attitudes that are often at odds with those of their host country. Just ask the Swedes about that.
There are two problems for LePen’s victorious opponents: While they have won a disparate and disunited majority of seats, they are so divided as to make governing in a clear and coherent way functionally impossible. This in turn means that the trends outlined above, which are driving an ever-growing share of voters into LePens arms, will only continue and perhaps hasten.
The same thing, you might note, is happening in Ireland. Politics is fundamentally breaking down because the politicians and the voters do not have a shared diagnosis of what ails the country.
For now, in Ireland, the political establishment, as in France, is largely united more around what should not happen than it is around what should: The Irish politician is more concerned about the rise of the far right than he or she is about the impact of immigration on the community that he or she represents. They are more concerned about implementing climate change mitigation policies than they are about the impact of those policies on voters affected by them. There is a sense across the west that politicians are more interested in global action than in local results.
This problem cannot be staved off forever. Already, we have seen dominoes fall in the Netherlands, Italy, and much of Eastern Europe. In France, the energies devoted to defeating LePen have left an exhausted political establishment with a squabbling and disunited parliament. In the UK, Labour limped to a landslide with just over a third of the vote and almost no margin for error between now and the next election, while Nigel Farage’s reform secured more than half the Governing party’s votes from almost nowhere in the campaign.
The only way, ultimately, to reduce support for the “far right” is to show their voters that there is a better option. But the political establishment across Europe has absolutely no intention of doing so.